


box car waiting

by derryfacts2 (winchysteria)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), M/M, Manager Eddie Kaspbrak, OC (Original Cat) - Freeform, Pining, Recreational Drug Use, smoking weed as a bonding exercise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26690080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchysteria/pseuds/derryfacts2
Summary: Eddie squints at the little silver bag under Richie’s right arm. “Is that drugs?” he asks. “Do you keep drugs in that bag?”“And paraphernalia,” Richie says, as himself. “This is our third tour together. What the hell did you think I kept in here? Communion wafers?”“I don’t know!” Eddie says, sitting up. “I tried not to think about it! How many state lines has that bag crossed?”“A lot.” Richie grins. “Yes or no?”---Eddie is Richie's manager, and they are professionals, mostly
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 101
Kudos: 505





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi Charlie. I come to you hat in hand, knowing that I am three days late for your birthday, and I have only half a fic to show for it, but in my defense, you are my friend and you should forgive me? There will be more of this but I wanted to like add it to the general energy of Charlie Birthday Weekend. Okay love you bye

Ken,

We are currently scheduled to be

Ken,

Richie is currently scheduled to be

Ken,

Mr. Tozier is currently scheduled to be in Atlantic City during

Mr. Tozier is currently scheduled to be touring on the east coast during that time, but he is very

It’s because Richie keeps sitting in front of windows. Really it is. Or at least because he keeps sitting in front of windows on bright afternoons, sun lancing in through his hair and striping across his eyes. It couldn’t be comfortable, the light sideways through the irises, like pieces of blue-green seaglass set luminous into his skin. Something laid over Eddie’s shoulderblades burns in response.

Richie’s head starts to tick up from his notebook, and Eddie, panicked, closes his eyes so as not to be caught.

“You good, champ?” Richie asks.

Under the table, the blunt rubber toe of Richie’s sneaker nudges at Eddie’s knee, which is stupid because Eddie’s feet and ankles are right there except for that would be an unambiguous gesture and so Richie is allergic to it. Instead, he picks up his whole stupid meaty right leg to tap Eddie under the kneecap as if testing his reflexes at a very shitty doctor’s office. This maneuver bumps the bottom of the table. Eddie opens his eyes to see Richie’s coffee—lid off, horrific—wobble dangerously.

“Just resting my eyes,” Eddie says.

“You gonna fall asleep during my show again, you selfish bastard?” When Richie reaches out for his coffee, his fingers cover the cardboard sleeve completely. His other hand dots the pen aimlessly across his notes.

“First of all, sleeping now would make me more likely to be awake later, and besides your fuckin’ show isn’t till tomorrow, and third of all, I haven’t fallen asleep during one of your shows since Vancouver and that was in, what, February? So just—” Eddie flaps a hand dismissively. 

Richie sighs. “I know you secretly like my comedy. Deep down inside my squishy caverns, I know you’re my biggest fan.”

“Yeah, I love when you go onstage; it’s the only time I can get any fuckin’ work done,” Eddie snarks, which is a baldfaced lie. If Richie is performing, Eddie is in the wings, tucked into the heavy curtains like an echo, only able to peel himself away if his phone rings.

It’s excuses all the way down, with Richie. Some of them are even good. Eddie had to watch Richie perform, at first, because this was his first real find, _his_ client, _his_ career to make or break for both of them. Then when the crowds got bigger and the laughs louder and there was less reason to worry, Eddie needed to watch to give notes, to deliver important news just as the show ended, to leech warmth from the stage lights when theaters are freezing. Last fall, for one blessed month, Richie’s nose wouldn’t stop running for love or money and so Eddie stood just offstage presenting a box of tissues like a tacky chef statue. He is a connoisseur, an artist, of excuses: no, Eddie can’t get any work done tucked into a cafe booth across from Richie, but this is the only way Richie can write on tour, and he’s recognizable enough now that he should have some supervision.

“Well, you gotta have a distraction to keep yourself from missing me too bad,” Richie says. “I know how you get when I’m out telling my jokes to other people.”

“The jealousy is overwhelming,” Eddie deadpans.

Ken,

Because of the current performing schedule, Mr. Tozier will only be available for shooting during the last week of January. We can put together a

Richie staunchly refuses to write with any instrument besides a Bic stick pen, the ten-cent kind that make Eddie’s hand cramp just to look at. He buys them in boxes of sixty and sheds them like dead skin. He keeps handfuls of them in his pants pockets, because he is the size of a Chevrolet Express and so his pockets need to be registered as real estate in Los Angeles County; they occasionally break under his weight and send blue-black patches of ink across his ass. They look like toothpicks in his hands. This pen scratches as it moves across the page, likely a first draft of Richie’s thousandth joke about his neurotic pinecone of a manager.

“Those won’t work,” Eddie had told him once. “Audiences want to relate to you. This is like telling a joke about something that happens in first class on a plane.”

“No, no, see,” Richie had said, tearing and rolling up little pieces of a straw wrapper as if preparing for a spitball war. “There’s an emotional constant. They’ll get it. They have someone in their life who fills that role.”

“What role?” Eddie had asked, one eyebrow up. “A babysitter? Your audience is a bunch of fuckin’ middle schoolers?”

Richie had barked a laugh. It was the first time he’d pushed back on one of Eddie’s suggestions. The jokes killed after all. They still do. Richie kept him around.

Ken,

I am attaching our current schedule for the month of January. Mr. Tozier would be happy to meet with yourself and

“Why do you wear those glasses again?” Richie asks. “Your eyes are fine.”

“They’re blue-light-cancelling,” Eddie says. He picks up his own coffee, remembers that it’s cold, pulls a face and drinks anyway. “I stare at a lot of screens.”

“Yeah, but there’s no actual scientific consensus saying that that disrupts your sleep patterns,” Richie says.

Eddie rolls his eyes but does not give him the satisfaction of looking up. “There’s no scientific consensus saying that it doesn’t. The logic makes sense.”

“They’re basically a sixty dollar tinfoil hat.”

“Okay, an actual scientific consensus takes forever,” Eddie says. “It’s not like scientists just shit out evidence for things. It’s—it’s—sixty bucks isn’t that much and it’s not like I’m hurting myself by wearing them if they don’t do anything, all right, it’s fucking—it’s risk-benefit analysis, asshole, when you get fucking technology insomnia alien cancer don’t come crying to me.”

“Perfect,” Richie says, and Eddie finally looks away from his still-empty email draft to see him scribbling furiously. “Couldn’t remember the phrasing you used last week. Oh, they’re gonna love that shit in flyover states.”

“You are such a dick.”

Richie grins his uneven procrastinator grin and writes faster. His handwriting is terrible. “You’re my Mona Lisa, Spaghetti.”

Eddie glows from the inside like a nightlight.

Like a sample of smallpox to a virologist, Richie is both a vital part of Eddie’s job and a potent way to stop him from doing it. Most emails from [ rtozier.inquiries@helmstalent.com ](mailto:rtozier.inquiries@helmstalent.com) are sent in the middle of the night.

Eddie snaps his laptop shut in defeat.

“You wanna go back to Mike’s?” Richie asks, attentive in his rare puppyish way.

“And do what?” Eddie asks. “Hang out with his houseplants?”

Richie hums. “Do you want to go to Dunkin?”

“We’re already at a Starbucks, Richie.”

“Yeah, but do you want to?” Eyebrows up, glasses sliding down. One big shoulder pressed against the window next to them.

Most things have to compete for Richie’s focus. Eddie finds that he usually doesn’t. Sometimes this massages Eddie’s ego: he earned it by being competent, trustworthy, worth paying attention to. Other times, a vain and hopeful part of him thinks that if the building caught fire, Richie would reach for his hand before he ran.

Eddie swallows this down. “Yeah, I wanna go to fuckin’ Dunkin. Let me see your notes.”

They Uber wastefully out to the only suburb with a Dunkin’ Donuts, and Richie sweet-talks Cherie (4.8 Stars) into taking them through the drive-thru and picking up their fare back to Mike’s condo in Ann Arbor. They’ve never gotten a hotel room when Richie performs in Detroit. Eddie had tried to insist on getting one for himself, the first tour, and Richie had laughed at him. “Okay, Mr. Monopoly. Give your hard-earned money to the Hilton when I have a perfectly good childhood friend at the University of Michigan.”

“I don’t want to impose,” Eddie had said and meant it. At the time, Richie’s sexuality was an untouched Jeopardy category: topic on the board, big white letters, but Eddie wasn’t going to be the first one to add it to the game. So the word “friend” seemed loaded.

“Pshh. Imposing was when I would take the Greyhound up from Chicago and sleep on his floor and steal his roommates’ cereal. The man has a guest room now. That’s a whole room for guests! How much more of an invitation could you want!” And Richie’s hair had flopped appealingly across his flatscreen forehead, and Eddie gave in as loudly and stubbornly as he could.

Now he purposely schedules rest days in Detroit so they can see Mike and his husband Bill, two birds with one stone, and it works wonderfully except when Mike-and-Bill share a romantic impulse and decide to spend the last gasp of September warmth on the other side of the state. “That means you’re free to do whatever tonight, though,” Eddie rattles off, resisting the urge to reach across the backseat and brush icing out of Richie’s stubble. “I know it’s your day off, but if you’re bored, there’s a couple of clubs in the city you can drop into, people have reached out. Since you want to go midwestern for your opener next year, there might be something here, although we’re definitely more likely to find someone in Chicago, but, you know, couldn’t hurt. Don’t eat a powdered donut inside of this poor woman’s car, Jesus fucking Christ. Look how clean it is in here.”

Richie laughs. Cherie says, “Yes, do not.”

Richie closes the box and remorselessly wipes his sugary fingertips on his jeans, to which Eddie says “you’re an animal,” to which Richie laughs again, big loud chin-back, like he was hoping for it.

“What would I do without you?” he says. Not for the first time.

“I pray every goddamn night that I never have to find out,” Eddie replies.

The unromantic flat hills and stripmalls of eastern Michigan pass behind Richie’s head. For a funny moment Richie’s hands seem to lose their bearing, floating in an awkward triangle from lap to seatbelt to knees. Likewise there is a lack of certainty in his voice when he says: “Can I ask you something, man?”

Eddie blinks. He turns his phone over in his hands, the gray case facing up. It was the least offensive one available at the Verizon store; he’d shattered his old phone on the sidewalk outside of the Tin Window in Milwaukee, six shows ago. Richie took a black Sharpie to it immediately. Baby-Sitter’s Club, Kristy Speaking. “Sure.”

Richie glances toward the front of the car. His jaw works briefly. “Is it always like that in there?” he asks.

“Like what? Where?”

Reaching out one arm, making the car smell more like himself, Richie raps the top of Eddie’s head. “The way you talk. Is that what it sounds like in there all the fucking time?”

Briefly, Eddie weathers the desire for Richie to just rest his whole hand there. Warm open palm weighing him down like that playground game: close your eyes, I’ll pretend to crack an egg, it’ll feel so so real but it’s not, it disappears when you look around for it.

“Yeah, what’s it supposed to fuckin’ sound like?” Eddie says. It feels like something he would say.

Richie whistles lowly. “You should smoke more weed, dude.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Whatever, Bill and Ted.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Why would that be a yes?”

“Like, Bill _and_ Ted,” Richie says, making a kind of hula gesture that Eddie can’t parse. “That’s two people.”

“There’s a show you could see in Ann Arbor, too,” Eddie steamrolls. “It’s not like there’s anything more exciting to do.”

Richie pops back up like Wile E. Coyote. “People smoke weed to treat insomnia. You could save money on those blue light glasses.”

“I haven’t been high since college. You have to decide what you’re doing tonight, Richie.”

“I have decided!”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“What, you wanna be alooone tonight? You inviting over some dude to desecrate Mike and Bill’s home?”

“Jesus Christ, no, but I—” Eddie throws his hands up, feeling juvenile. “I don’t want you to be stuck with me. It’s your day off. Do whatever the fuck you want.”

“Motherfucker, in what world am I going to choose watching a bunch of frat boys stumble through a loose, watery ten over hanging out with you?”

“That’s disgusting,” Eddie says, pleased.

Richie reaches out and punches him tenderly in the thigh.

Eddie is aware that he’s not particularly interesting. He grew up in upstate New York. He enjoys golfing. He double-majored in business and communications. All of his suits are black, gray, or navy, except for the eggplant-purple one deep in his closet which he has never worn. This is not the worst thing in the world: god knows that there are more nightmarish and interesting people in show business than anywhere else. Plane crashes are fascinating and he doesn’t envy those.

But then there are people like Richie, who are loud and bright and artful, like tropical birds, and who are also good. Kind deep down in the bones. Interested in being happy. It makes Eddie want to go rummaging around in himself for the jagged corners he tried so hard to sand down and say look, see, I didn’t come off the assembly line like this, I built myself to fit around things that have happened to me. I am an entire story. For fuck's sake, read me.

The night before this tour began, Eddie had gotten drunk on Stan From Finance’s couch, and he had said, “Richie is the only person who knows that I own a purple suit. I think I bought it so I could tell him.”

“Peahens are brown and white,” Stan From Finance had said wisely, but he was happily married, so fuck him.

“Hello, love of my life,” Richie says in a voice at once deep and sing-song, like a Tolkein dwarf. _Yeah, hi,_ Eddie thinks, closing Mike’s front door behind them.

There is a little answering trill from the living room, and then a small black-and-white head appears over the arm of Mike’s couch. “Ah, my brilliant girl,” Richie says, arms outstretched. “God’s finest work. The Viola Davis of cats.”

Puddy mostly stays on the bus when they tour. Sometimes she comes backstage in her little soft-sided carrier. She is, as Richie says, his bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones picked out. Eddie had not been convinced, at first, that the logistics of an animal on tour could work out, but Richie had held his new rescue cat up under his chin so that their begging faces formed a totem pole and said, “Eddie, baby, if anyone can do the logistics, it’s you.” And so Eddie found miraculously that he could.

It helped that Puddy is happy anywhere warm and relatively near to Richie. She and Eddie are on the same wavelength that way.

“Hi, Puddy,” Eddie says, rubbing his knuckles over her bony little head. She sniffs his hand with polite interest.

Because Mike-and-Bill are out of town, Richie has taken over their bedroom. He does not share Eddie’s hangups about sleeping on mattresses where one’s friends have definitely had sex. Eddie has the guest bed, which Richie pointed out yesterday that Mike-and-Bill have probably also had sex on. But as the maestro of excuses, Eddie is comforted by that _probably_ and still flops face-first onto it. He looks at the green and white stripes of the comforter and tries to focus: there would be Toronto, next, a long drive, and then Buffalo, and they had their passports, right, surely: yes. Eddie’s bag. One on top of the other. He remembered placing them that way.

“You know what you want for dinner yet?” Richie asks from the doorway. Eddie rolls gently from side to side as if to shake his whole body no.

“I think falafel,” Richie says. “That one place is on Postmates now.”

“I have an UberEats discount code,” Eddie says, nasal, face pressed flat to the bed.

“It’s probably on UberEats too, cheapskate,” Richie says.

Eddie gives him a thumbs up.

“Hey, spaghetti,” Richie says. “Spaghetti. Squidward. Squints. Scarface.”

“Those don’t even rhyme with Eddie,” Eddie says, and rolls over.

In one arm Richie has a holographic makeup bag that used to belong to his neighbor, Bev, and in the other he has Puddy. She looks smug and strapped-in with Richie’s wide forearm across her belly. “I’m riffing,” Richie says, and then, “I could make them rhyme.”

“Please don’t,” Eddie says.

“You wanna make this falafel thing interesting?” Richie asks. He wiggles his shoulders in a way that is probably meant to be enticing and also is, deeply, because he makes Eddie’s brain pop like a corn kernel.

“Are you trying to make falafel out of the cat?”

Richie laughs, and then quickly looks aghast, clutching Puddy to his chest with a dowager aunt mouth-pinch. “How positively barbaric, Mr. Kaspbrak,” he trills. “There’s barely enough on this animal for an appetizer! What are we, paupers?” Then, transitioning in his uncanny way to a young Keanu: “Would you like to get most excellently loud with me on Mike-and-Bill’s back deck?”

Eddie squints at the little silver bag under Richie’s right arm. “Is that drugs?” he asks. “Do you keep drugs in that bag?”

“And paraphernalia,” Richie says, as himself. “This is our third tour together. What the hell did you think I kept in here? Communion wafers?”

“I don’t know!” Eddie says, sitting up. “I tried not to think about it! How many state lines has that bag crossed?”

“A lot.” Richie grins. “Yes or no?”

“Well.” Eddie looks around the room, at his little black overnight suitcase and his chargers on the bedside table. Excuses, Edward. Your specialty. “I’m working, technically.”

“This will help my career,” Richie offers. “You know how much material I could get out of stoned Spaghetti?”

“I—smoking is terrible for you.”

“With the way you drive, Eds, if God wanted you off the mortal coil, he would have taken the opportunity already.” Richie rests his temple against the doorframe serenely.

The thing about Eddie’s excuse machine is that it is much better at getting close to Richie than staying away from him. He wants to sit on Mike-and-Bill’s back deck as the sun gets low and put his mouth on a small burning thing recently touched by Richie’s mouth. “I don’t—I think—the last time I tried I just got paranoid and cried because I never went to summer camp.”

“I’ll take you to summer camp sometime,” Richie says nonsensically. “I hope this doesn’t sound callous, but I’ll actually get even better material if you freak out a little.”

There are holes in the hem of Richie’s t-shirt, close together, a big and a small one, little congruent circles like an uneven number 8. “Why?” Eddie asks, and he probably means why do you want to be here with me the two of us, why can’t you get offstage without touching me on the shoulder or the face or the waist, why do I count to you.

But Richie says, “Because it’s my birthday.”

“Your birthday is in March.”

Richie flips him off. “Because it’s Puddy’s birthday, then.”

“Puddy is a rescue. You have no idea when her birthday is.” Ask me again, a very small Eddie begs inside of Eddie’s chest, like a Russian nesting doll.

“It’s someone’s birthday!”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know, fucking—Puddy’s owner in a parallel universe, man,” Richie says, glasses sliding down so that the top of the plastic rim is in front of his pupils.

“Puddy’s parallel universe owner,” Eddie repeats, and he gets up from the bed.

“Yeah, some, uh, some noble social worker. In overalls. Look, you don’t actually have to if you don’t want to. We can just sit on the porch.”

“No, I want to,” Eddie says. He pushes Richie’s glasses up his nose for him and Richie, trusting, does not blink.

Mike-and-Bill’s back deck looks out over a little pond, across which you can see the back decks of another set of condominiums. They have plants in glazed ceramic pots, the kind you get from the little artsy boutiques in Ann Arbor, and there are two mismatched deck chairs. A Mike chair and a Bill chair. Very yours-mine-and-ours. Richie rolls the joint carefully on the table between them.

Industry events are much more likely to feature little armies of liquor bottles. Cocaine, pretty often, on the host’s coffee table or the bathroom sink of a more public place. But Eddie’s a grown man. He has seen someone roll a joint before. Just because he doesn’t get asked to partake very much, because his baby eyes and his cop eyebrows make him look like a narc, that doesn’t mean he’s never seen someone roll a joint before.

Still.

He feels his brain recording and remixing even as he watches. The rasp of the grinder and the attendant flex of the wrist muscles. The thud of fingertips, short-nailed, against the paper. Pull of tongue and and then twist, Richie’s eyes low-bright again in the sunset. There is a beginningness to it. Like opening credits.

“I’m gonna cough,” Eddie says abruptly, and Richie looks up, which is probably what Eddie wanted in the first place. “Just. I haven’t had a cigarette since 2011. I’m definitely going to cough.”

Over the frame of his glasses, Richie looks at Eddie and then shrugs.

“Don’t laugh,” Eddie finishes.

“Neither of us can keep me from laughing at things I want to laugh at, Eduardo, but just know it comes from a place of love. And also, I will pat your back.”

Eddie looks at Richie’s ten-pound, T-bone steak, flying saucer hands and thinks about that for a moment. Really thinks about it.

“Here, hang on,” Richie says. “I’ll shotgun you.”

His brain, which was still very much occupied with being patted on the back by Richie, is now inundated with a response to this image. Richie leaning across, tendons in his neck stretched out to support the architecture of his fine square jaw, and fitting his lips—

“Shotgun? Are you a frat boy trying to fuck me?”

“Am I what?”

Like the Ice Age squirrel in front of an avalanche, Eddie tries to outrun the consequences of his actions. “Am I a Delta Kappa named Tiffany who’s had four wine coolers? Shotgun?”

Richie’s cackle is long and echoey, reminiscent of a rooster crow, so dramatically cracked open like a can of Sprite that Eddie startles. “Jesus,” Eddie says, and then watches the deepening of the creases in Richie’s cheek as he laughs.

“Oh, man,” Richie says, flicking the lighter like a theater kid behind a dumpster. He takes a deep toke, chest rising and rounding, holds, and lets it float out with a smoke-deep voice as he says, “Eds, you are my favorite piece of work.”

“I’m kidding,” Eddie says.

“I know,” Richie says. “No, here, like—“ he cups his hands around his mouth, joint protruding from the second and third fingers of his right hand.

Eddie copies him skeptically.

“Inhale when I—it’ll help mellow it out. Ease you into it,” Richie promises, and then takes a fast, forceful hit, before he cups his hands around his mouth again, leans forward to press their hands together and exhales hot into the space between them. Eddie rolls his eyes skyward and wonders furiously whether or not Richie is looking at him.

The smoke-tinged air pours into his throat like weak coffee. He got a third of a hit, if that, and the rest is just Richie’s breath, which is objectively disgusting and subjectively something else. “That’s going to do nothing,” Eddie says, .

Richie squints at him over his hands and says, “But you didn’t cough.”

“I also don’t cough when I walk past a humidifier,” Eddie says. “Same level of potency.”

The squint gets harder, Richie’s eyebrows coming dangerously close to the cherry as it glows in the gentle wind, and then Richie coughs, once, close-mouthed.

“Oh my god,” Eddie says.

“I was—” Richie protests. He coughs again.

“You’re the stupidest fucking person I’ve ever met,” Eddie says. Richie descends into a fit of laughing and hacking, so Eddie reaches over to pluck the joint out of his hand. “You want water? I’ll get you some fucking water. Jesus Christ.”

He can hear Richie laughing even with the door closed behind him. Mike-and-Bill’s house is that funny kind of summer-evening dark, all the overhead lights off, the sunset coming in through the sliding glass door in one big orange square. He puts the joint in his mouth, one hand occupied with a glass and the other with a Brita pitcher, and then inhales experimentally. The smoke burnishes his lungs like metal as it travels down. Not so bad, he thinks.

“Okay, in my defense,” Richie begins saying as soon as he hears the sliding door open. “I was trying to help _you._ I inhaled too fast because I didn’t want it to sit in my lungs for that long or else I would steal all the THC. It was a chivalrous gesture.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eddie says. Richie takes the water with a nod. “This is what chivalry’s come to. Fight a fuckin’ dragon for me next time.”

Richie holds his hand out for the joint, takes a hit, and exhales dramatically through his nose. “Fight me yourself,” he says. Eddie slaps the back of his head.

“Mm, I ordered dinner, by the way,” Richie says.

“Already?”

“What? You’re gonna thank me for that. You’re the least patient person I know. You have metabolism where your patience should be.”

Eddie takes the joint from Richie’s upturned hand. “I’m not that bad. I can be patient when I want to.”

“Oh, really?” Richie scoots his chair back to look at Eddie, leaning on the wall that frames one side of the deck. “When’s the last time you waited for something without bitching about it?”

Feeling very hot on the back of the neck, Eddie looks out at the pond rushes. “Last night I spent with your mom, asshole,” he says on an exhale.

“Ow, Eds, someone came to play ball. Jesus.” Richie giggles, and his shoulders shake. He laughs at Eddie’s jokes the same way he laughs at his own.

“Your dad said the same thing,” Eddie says, and tries not to smile when Richie squeaks.

After a miniature breakdown, which Eddie bears quite patiently, thank you very much, Richie wipes his eyes. “You gonna sit down or what?”

“That’s Puddy’s chair now,” Eddie says, gesturing at the green wicker rocker that he assumed corresponded to Mike. Puddy’s head pops out of the little wreath of her body and tail; she looks unimpressed. “I’m good standing.”

“She’s so rude,” Richie says fondly. “Old women can do whatever they want. You tellin’ Eddie to get his steps in, Puds?”

Puddy tucks her head back between her paws.

“Hey, Eds,” Richie says, and pats his be-denimed thighs. “Share with me.”

The fantasies associated with this request are many, differing from each other only slightly, like green beans packed into a can. Eddie acquiesces sometimes, if he’s drunk enough, if there are people around to make it into a joke, but he’s not drunk now. His fingers tingle. Everything feels fragile all of a sudden, like Eddie’s the center of a wind chime; he is afraid of the noise he’ll make if he moves.

“You’re funny,” Eddie says, and he perches gently on the arm of the Adirondack chair.

“You think so,” Richie replies. “I know you do ‘cause you work on commission. Shit, the joint is out.”

He flicks the lighter a few times, fruitlessly: the wind has picked up enough to make it a little cold and a little difficult. “Here,” Eddie says, feeling lawless, and he twists, crossing his legs over Richie’s body. He places his heels on the patch of seat unoccupied by Richie’s legs. He makes with his hands a little shield so that Richie can relight.

Richie looks up at him as they pass the stub back and forth, creating a busy molten-ness in Eddie’s gut. They don’t touch anywhere except for the back of Eddie’s heels wedged against Richie’s thigh, but Eddie memorizes how they are crossed over each other, like mismatching Tetris pieces. No matter how hard he wishes, Richie's hands stay politely tucked in his lap.

“What’d you get me?” Eddie says blearily, and a white paper bag falls into his lap.

“C’mon, Eds, Eddie, Eddie-baby,” Richie says as he leans on the back of the couch. “Who do you think I am? I know all your orders.”

“Izzit food?” Eddie asks, and then laughs.

“Oh, you’re high-high,” Richie says. “I should be taking notes.”

It’s nice, being high, a buttery swim like the prelude to falling asleep. Eddie’s thoughts are agreeably muddled. One half of an idea will lose its partner and grab hands with the next closest thing. _Richie knows me,_ he thinks, and then _is yogurt savory or sweet or what,_ and then it’s very important that he reach out and touch the velvety fur under Puddy’s ears.

“Yoplait is fucked up,” he says aloud.

“What?” Richie says through a mouthful of fattoush.

“Yoplait. It comes in all those fucking dessert flavors.”

“Added sugar is a plague,” Richie replies gamely, and Eddie recognizes the tilt to his voice that indicates he’s quoting. “Preach it, dude.”

“No, that’s not,” Eddie says. “It’s like, people think yogurt is a sweet food. But all the sweet flavors are added in there. It goes against the yogurt’s nature.”

“Say that again,” Richie says. “I’m taking a voice memo.”

He holds his phone out, speaker end first. Eddie leans very close to it and says “kiss my ass.” Richie sprays bits of cucumber onto the coffee table.

Occasionally, Richie says something along the lines of “you should be the comedian, Eds.” Most of the time it’s a compliment: Richie thinks Eddie is the funniest person alive, despite the way Eddie pants and shakes trying to keep up with him in conversation. Other times, it’s laced with self-deprecation, when Richie is shot down by an audience or a director or himself. Very occasionally, it carries real venom: if you know better, Eddie, if you’re the authority, if I’m a dancing clown. Whatever you say, honey. It makes Eddie’s saliva run bitter. But this is vanishingly rare. The two of them argue with each other much more than they actually disagree.

“I think I could get back into the sax thing,” Richie says. “I still think that was funny.” For a while, Richie has been idly anxious about writing a new hour of material, a set that—if Eddie knows anything—will likely be _the_ set, the Netflix special, the calling card, the bits that become cultural shorthand.

“It’s confusing,” Eddie argues. His mouth is brutally dry. His stomach feels like a bowling ball of hummus.

“I like having a prop onstage, though. I like having something to do with my hands.” Richie wiggles his fingers, _Hocus Pocus_ style.

Eddie sticks and unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “It’s a fuckin’—it’s that thing. The gun on the wall. If you just wear the sax onstage people expect it to be part of a bit, preferably the final punchline, and then they get distracted waiting for it.”

“Chekov,” Richie says. “I think it would be funny if I walked on playing it. No opening line. Just me rocking out to ‘In the Mood.’”

“Yeah, sure,” Eddie says. “When you can play something that isn’t Hot Cross Buns you can start bringing the sax onstage again.”

Neither of them can figure out Mike-and-Bill’s home entertainment system, so Richie’s phone sits on the end table between them playing tinny Bob Dylan. _He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train._ It seems unnecessarily sad.

“Hey, you know what Amy said?” Richie says lightly.

“Which Amy?” Eddie asks. He kicks his shoes off and puts his feet up on the far armrest of the couch.

Richie, slumped in the armchair nearest Eddie’s head, reaches his own feet out to rest on the coffee table. “She said I should get out there more. People like jokes about dating and sex and shit.”

“You date,” Eddie says with concern, craning his neck to see Richie’s face. It’s blank, peppered in shadows and lines and stubble that’s not as patchy as it was when they first met.

“Not that much, man,” Richie says. He looks from his feet to Eddie’s eyes, then back to his feet. “Not anymore.”

There’s a joke Eddie’s not in on, he’s sure of it. A slang term everyone knows but him. “Why not?”

Richie shrugs. Despite his long arms, he likes to pull sweatshirt sleeves over his hands and pick at the cuffs: these ones are in tatters, and Richie studies the tatters intently. “Busy, I guess.”

“Busy people date,” Eddie says.

“You don’t.”

Eddie’s exhausted. Eyes heavy, calves aching. The temptation to plant a finish line feels overwhelming, and he hates Richie a little for being here while he self-destructs. “Well, I guess I’m traveling around with you too much.”

“You don’t have to travel with me as much as you do,” Richie says. “You don’t do it for anyone else.”

“No, I don’t,” Eddie snaps, body full up with the drumbeat of _he knows, he knows, he knows._ “I’ll stop if you want.”

It’s very quiet except for Bob Dylan, who says _I got ice water in my veins._ Then there comes the quiet sound of a sniff. Eddie looks around in surprise. Richie’s hand is under his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose, and his lips are tight.

“Rich?”

His hand comes down, away from his face, but he doesn’t look at Eddie. His voice creaks. “I don’t want that, man. You’re, like, my best friend.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He reaches a hand toward Richie, not sure what he wants or expects, and Richie grabs it awkwardly, pinching his palm around Eddie’s fingers like a kid. “I’ll stick around.”

“That would be cool of you,” Richie says with a little hiccup-laugh.

“Richie, I would let you hit me into the sun with a baseball bat.”

The longer Eddie tries to stay awake, the more everything in his head feels flat and hot and dry, baked into the dirt. Richie looks wildly handsome, eyelashes mussed into little points, color high in his cheeks, trunk solid under the softness of the sweatshirt. He hopes Richie lets him fall asleep like this. Holding onto him.

Eddie feels the powerful urge to fall on his own sword.

“Are you in love with me?” he asks, pushing on the pad of Richie’s hand with his fingertips. “You have to tell me if you are.” It takes bizarrely little effort to say.

Richie looks at him with dark, shiny eyes. He looks like an old Dutch painting, the golden glow illuminating the subject, background dark and comparatively unimportant. Every hope Eddie has in the world hangs over his head like that gun, or what is it, the sword, the one in the myth.

Richie’s voice is tectonically low. “I don’t have to tell you jack shit, man.”

Eddie closes his eyes, the cottony pull of sleep becoming unbearable. “Well, you _should_ tell me, then.”

“Yeah, good night, Eddie,” Richie says, and he doesn’t sound pleased, but he doesn’t try to take his soft sturdy hand out of Eddie’s grasp.

He floats on the surface of the deep-violet pool of sleep for a number of minutes, dipping under and then back up, just slightly too aware of his work clothes and the couch underneath him. He does not notice Richie’s hand leaving his, but he feels a pressure on the top of his head. Richie’s mouth, and then his forehead, it feels like, pushed into his hair. The pleasure of this feels in Eddie’s chest like a train passing close by, the rumbling and gravity.

It’s quiet. For a second.

“Of course I am,” Richie says at a whisper. “How the hell else did you think things were gonna end up, with me?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it has been an extremely long fucking time! As you can see by the fact that this is ten thousand words it got away from me! I hope you like it anyway!

They met for the first time in a Wendy’s. Richie had been young and amorphous, the raw material of a person defined primarily by bangs and glasses, surviving on dollar-menu chicken sandwiches and the gnawing drive to perform. He presented Eddie, who was likewise young but never in the sapling, potential-laden way Richie was, with a conundrum: he made Eddie want to keep the job he’d hated for four years, and he was probably going to get him fired.

It happened late at night, a black-and-silver Wednesday in downtown Chicago. Eddie had been sent out to scout someone else, somebody whose father knew Eddie’s boss. Kevin, or Kelly, or whatever. It was mostly a gesture. All Eddie had needed to do was sit down, shut up, take a few notes, hand off a business card. As long as he was awake and physically present around midnight, when the kid was supposed to go on, everything would have been fine.

Instead, at 9:45, the host of the open mic had introduced someone named Trashmouth. This flipped Eddie’s world like a burger patty. KevinKelly’s performance slot came and went as Eddie crouched on the sidewalk outside of Cole’s and burned through his cell phone data watching every video of Richie Tozier that YouTube would cough up.

The first thing Richie ever said to him directly was: “what the fuck are you twitching at, Elder Price?”

The Wendy’s was empty, except for the two of them and a cashier who looked over judgmentally at the volume of Richie’s voice. A piece of lettuce hung from the corner of his mouth. Eddie loomed wordlessly over his table like No-Face, scrabbling for a way to explain the strange sense of kismet that had led him here.

“Elder Price?” he said, instead.

“What, you don’t see it?” Richie asked, gesturing to Eddie’s torso.

Eddie looked down at his black pants, black tie, white shirt. “This is perfectly normal business casual.”

“You’re wearing a backpack,” Richie said, and he took another bite of the sandwich in his hand. Four other sandwiches sat, still wrapped, on the table, like they were being forced to witness the execution of one of their family members.

Eddie grabbed the straps self-consciously. “It’s better for your thoracic spine.”

“I’d rather break my back, dude. You look like you just got bullied at a charter school.”

He said it in that flat, pissy way that people said things when they were thinking about taking a swing at Eddie, and he shoved his fists into the pockets of his hoodie. Eddie felt small—not afraid, really, but annoyed and scratchy, like discarded tinfoil.

“Are you trying to start a fight with me right now?” he asked.

Richie shrugged. “I mean, I’m broke, my opinions on Jesus are pretty set in stone, and I’ve had a shitty fucking day, so unless you’re trying to cruise me or murder me, I don’t know what the fuck you’re still doing here.”

There was a script for these interactions, for the smooth, professional introduction and the exchange of contact information, but it was locked up behind a thick metal door with the rest of Eddie’s conversational skills. His train of thought pinged off it occasionally as it looped through stages of self-loathing. With great exertion, Eddie tried to remember how meeting someone went.

“You’re Richie Tozier,” he blurted, which probably didn’t make him seem like less of a creep.

Richie’s eyebrows dug in toward his nose. “Do I know you?”

“You were at Cole’s earlier,” Eddie said in lieu of an answer. “Comedy night.”

If anything, Richie was getting more hostile. “Yeah, congrats, Columbo. What, did you follow me here?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said reflexively. “Fuck you, is what I did.”

“I would have remembered that,” Richie said, like he couldn’t help it. He swung his feet out from under the table as if to leave.

It was like the biggest prank anyone had ever played on him. Eddie went years believing that everyone else in entertainment was full of shit when they talked about instincts and gut feelings—Eddie, after all, was a fundamentally feral person, and his modest success had only ever come from the manners and professionalism he smoothed along his outsides like papier-mâché. When he first got his bizarre internship, he had heard the little fairy tales about this job, the way you’d look at a performer and just _know,_ how quickly it came on, the stars in your eyes, the stubbornness. He knew this was stupid. He put hard work and responsible choices into the little machine of his life, and it spat out incremental raises and extra responsibilities. This worked; it had always worked.

And then Richie came onstage, and the feeling seized him like some stubborn little kid grabbing him by the hand, and Eddie, the idiot, had followed it.

He resolved to hand in his two weeks’ notice the next day, and he resolved also to get a job in insurance next, because it was a sensible choice. His instincts could choke. His instincts had a shitty sense of direction and terrible improv skills.

Except, god damn everything, he _knew_ he wasn’t wrong about Richie.

“Look, do you have representation?”

This was the funniest joke Richie had ever heard. He sagged back into his chair. He laughed like he was passing a kidney stone. “Are you kidding?” he said, gesturing to his hoodie, his pile of fast food wrappers. “Do I look like I have representation?”

The cashier was looking over again, like she also thought maybe Eddie was here to commit murder. He pressed on, desperate to sate his conscience and go the fuck home. “Well, do you want it?”

“Are you in stand-up?” Richie asked. “You should be in standup.”

“No, I’m not a big enough dipshit,” Eddie snapped, digging in the pockets of his backpack for a card. “Just—here.”

Richie took in the contents of the card with skeptical eyes, glasses slipping down his nose as the laughter slid to a stop. “You’re serious,” he said, after a minute.

“No, I printed those up just to fuck with you,” Eddie said. He could hear the brassy human noises of people in the kitchen, yelling over the fryers.

Richie looked up over his glasses, and Eddie felt a sudden, foolish sense of kinship to him, like all this time they’ve been skipping gym together. “Why?” Richie asked.

Eddie played tug-of-war with the words that would organize his certainty into something recognizable. “You’re funny,” he said, after a minute.

“Not today.” Richie’s voice was light and flippant. “Nobody laughed. I think you might have shitty taste.”

Hotly, Eddie said, “I don’t care. I know what I saw.”

One of the first things Eddie ever learned about him was that Richie was quiet in very rare and very serious ways. He tipped his swimming-pool eyes down again, toward the card in his hands, as his face curled up in a grinchy way that Eddie couldn’t quite parse.

“It doesn’t have to be me,” Eddie said. “It could be somebody else at the company. I mean, I don’t have a lot of experience.”

“No, you seem cool.”

“I might also get fired for skipping most of the open mic.”

This made Richie laugh again, a real one. Eddie noticed his overbite, his front teeth round against his bottom lip.

“But, I mean, either way,” Eddie pressed. “I’ll make sure it’s someone. Just use the card. It would be fucking stupid if you didn’t.”

“Yeah, thanks, I will.” He blinked a couple of times before he looked back up. “So, do you go by Mr. Kaspbrak, or are you saving that formality for after high school graduation?”

“Eddie’s fine, Trashmouth.” Which wasn’t exactly suave professionalism, but at least Eddie didn’t feel like he had to pry the words out, one by one, from between his teeth. “I have to be at work in like seven hours, but email me or something.”

“I could call you Edward Francis?” Richie called as Eddie turned toward the door. “It fits. You’re like a very fetching ghost child.”

“Lose my number,” Eddie deadpanned.

He got a foot out the door—the night was unseasonably warm, like the world was flipping over to show its belly—before Richie said, “Hey, Eddie?”

Eddie looked back, eyebrows up.

“Please try not to get fired.”

When Eddie was getting oriented as a full-time employee—an executive assistant, to begin with—Marnie from HR had referred to The Instinct as “coattail fever.” At the time, it had not struck Eddie as cynical. Of course you signed clients when you were sure you could make them a success.

The last thing Eddie remembers from that night is the way Richie had looked from outside, framed in the bright white square of the window. His face was soft and surprised. Dawn peeked out from under his eyelashes. The impulse that had dragged Eddie around by the hair all night slowed down just enough for him to recognize it: not certainty, but dogged belief. He felt his faith in Richie Tozier take root in his breast pocket like a mapleseed.

Eddie does not wake up so much as he trips through a cobweb between his blurry dark memory and the blurry dark present. Just enough light filters in from the front door that he can see his hands in front of his face. He sits up without any real agenda.

He’s still baked, but not so much that he can’t feel the fuzz on his teeth and the sour note at the roof of his mouth. The cobwebs stick to him. He’s on Mike-and-Bill’s couch, because—because he had managed to convince Richie this time that the guy who paid both of their bills should get the guest bedroom. Except that’s not right, that was last year, and he hadn’t even thought about making that argument in a while, and besides if he meant to sleep on the couch they would have folded it out. It’s—

Eddie lets his grownup instincts take over, the boring but powerful urge to brush teeth, change clothes, crawl between sheets. Something knocks gently at his frontal lobe and he ignores it, too heavy in the head to paw off the memories of every other time he had slept on a couch and woken up thinking of Richie. A glass of water first. His throat feels the way it did when they’d intubated him to take out his appendix.

The kitchen is a little lighter than the living room. Eddie takes a glass from the cupboard, but he fills it from the tap, exhausted by the prospect of opening the fridge and getting the Brita. He looks out the sliding glass door in a neanderthal effort to guess whether it’s closer to dawn or midnight, and he is also too tired to startle, but it still surprises him for a second to see a dark figure outside.

Richie’s shoulders are hunched. His broad back faces Eddie, but he’s not wearing a jacket, so his fists are almost certainly shoved into the pockets of his sweatpants. There is a little glow against the side of his head that makes Eddie think blearily of aliens. Eddie shuffles closer, both because of the glow and because of Richie’s inexplicable gravity. The high, protective like a snowsuit on a toddler, makes him want to fling himself at hard surfaces.

He wishes Richie wouldn’t go out at night in just a t-shirt. It’s too cold.

It takes the gentle murmur of voices for Eddie to realize that the glow next to Richie’s ear is his cell phone, pinched between jaw and shoulder so he can talk to someone without unwinding the rest of his body. “Okay, but you weren’t there,” Richie says.

Through the glass of the door, Eddie can’t pick out any sounds from the person on the other line. Richie waits for them to reply, though, which probably means it’s Mike.

Eddie’s fingertips tingle.

“Fuck you, I’m a reliable narrator!” Richie says. “It was exactly that bleak!”

Light reflects off the little ripples in the decorative pond, small white stripes that snap in half where Richie’s outline interrupts them. He shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Yeah, I mean, we both know we’re not exactly professional with each other. But that’s, like, incidental, like, we were basically Beevis and Butthead when we started out. It doesn’t mean—he’s just known me a long time.”

There is something missing, something Eddie knows the shape of: he takes in the top layer of the sentence, just the sounds and syllables. Like Spanish class. He remembers the glass of water in his hand and drinks from it anxiously.

Richie is louder when he says, “Yeah, fucking exactly, you’re not in his head!” He doesn’t wait very long for the reply, either, and he says, “I just, I’m not playing this little game with you, it’s not fucking fun. Like, yeah, I guess I thought, maybe, but obviously not. He knows and he doesn’t—he was _nice_ to me about it. Commiserate with me. Will you stop being a dick?”

Richie takes a hand out of his pants pocket to grab the phone and re-situate it against his other ear. “Yeah, I know I’m being a dick right now.”

Something cool and soft rubs against Eddie’s ankle, and he jumps. Puddy’s big eyes glow up at him from the floor. He makes big eyes back at her, like, _and???_

“Worst-case, I mean, I don’t know,” Richie says. His voice coming through the glass is round and shallow like a plate. “Would you still want to be around somebody all the time if they felt—I mean, if you knew—”

The thing knocking at Eddie’s brain gets a little louder, more insistent. Maybe if he checked his calendar—Richie’s free hand goes to his face, and Eddie feels Puddy’s little body nudge another figure-eight around his feet. She makes a high rumble. His pulse spikes.

 _Don’t start screaming,_ he begs her silently. She looks unmoved, scrubbing a cheek against his shinbone. The righteous cat anger in her face says that it’s Eddie’s fault Richie is outside. She opens her tiny pink mouth.

By the time Puddy’s meow is finished, Eddie is halfway to the bathroom. He brushes his teeth and changes in air that feels like pudding. There is no noise from anywhere else in the house. His pulse won’t stop rabbiting, but sleep takes him back almost angrily, and Eddie disappears into a dream where he can tap Richie on the arm and Richie opens up to him and Eddie collects the smoke over and over again with his mouth.

Except for the dream, Eddie would think he hadn’t slept at all: when he wakes up, his heart is hammering at the underside of his ribs with both fists. His lizard brain tells him stories about lions and snakes. The alarm clock on the bedside table blinks ten-something, and Eddie’s out of bed before he can read the minutes, because he feels distinctly like he’s slept through something important.

There’s nothing for the morning in his phone calendar, though, which usually contains more information about Eddie than his genome. He scrolls back to last night, but it’s just a big block of Optional Yellow: _open mic the independent-- opener?_ And he remembers that he asked Richie and Richie turned that down, laughed it off with powdered sugar on his fingertips, because what he had really wanted to do—

It pops through Eddie’s head like a string of cheap fireworks. He prickles hot and cold in successive waves, up from his feet and over his scalp.

“Richie?” he calls without thinking, and then he unsticks himself from the floor and thunders out into the hallway. _“Richie?”_

Eddie’s alone in the house.

It takes him several minutes to be sure. Richie’s suitcase is still open on the floor of the master bedroom, but he’s nowhere to be found: Eddie stomps through every room twice, even though he knows he would have seen him on the first pass because Richie’s gigantic and also because Eddie’s body likes to tell him when Richie is in the room by kicking him in the stomach. Puddy’s carrier is gone, too, which means Richie didn’t just step out for a walk this morning or fall off Mike’s porch into the water feature last night.

He picks a pillow up off the couch and screams into it until his head spins.

Then he stays there a little longer, letting the texture of it anchor him so he can remember the way Richie’s voice had sounded when he said _of course I am_.

Was it supposed to have been obvious?

As he stomps through the house a third time, he drafts a number of texts to Richie. It takes a long time. He flashes violently between searing hope and the sick, dizzy feeling of having done something wrong; the thousand possible endings roll around under his feet, hard and small like marbles. Richie is in love with him, probably, and Eddie somehow spoiled it.

He paces through the kitchen and talks himself down from saying “I love you” over text, because it feels cold and tinny and because waiting for a response would kill him. In the living room, he reminds himself not to sound accusatory, because Richie is a grown adult who can leave houses when he wants to. In the hallway, he axes the phrase “run away”; in the bedroom, he adds and drops Richie’s name a dozen times. He stands on the cold tile in the master bathroom and sends _Did u get kidnapped?_

After a minute, propping his left toes on his right ankle to warm them up, he adds _Puddy also?_ His eyes in the mirror are embarrassed.

Eddie is not adept with either delicacy or patience. He gets out his running shoes. The worn-down pavement passes gray and pebbly underneath him, and for probably the five hundredth time he feels an arthritic twinge in his right knee and thinks he’ll eventually need a joint replacement. Not until his sixties, most likely, but Eddie is normally sort of far-sighted about disaster.

Richie replies by mile two: _out getting work done, doing writing, ur welcome_

_have dowager empress, she has a sharp sense of comedic timing, totally indispensable to the process_

Eddie hiccups with relief and stops briefly to stretch, one hand braced on the rough metal of a stop sign. He wants to ask which child monarch Puddy is supposed to be ruling in the stead of, but a sudden jittery insecurity stops him, because what if he’s remembering that wrong? What if he sounds stupid? And what if he reminds Richie that Eddie is bright and engaging the same way a hand mirror would be if you held it up at a fireworks show, and Richie, of course, is the firework?

Normally, he thinks as he starts back down the loop of Mike-and-Bill’s neighborhood, one foot heavy in front of the other, normally Richie thinks it’s funny when he says wrong things with complete confidence. Normally Richie favors him in that way. Eddie is suddenly afraid that’s conditional.

He makes himself wait until he’s finished running, standing sweaty and barefoot in the bathroom, before he says: _Glad ur not dead_ and ducks into the shower immediately.

 _didn’t want to deprive u of rare decent mattress sleep on tour_ , Richie replies, _but should have left a note, very sorry._

Eddie towels off his hair and then rests his forehead on the cool bathroom counter as he rides out the painful wave of feeling like his mother.

It’s not even like it’s unusual for Richie to be awake and moving before Eddie. Throughout the course of their late twenties and early thirties together, Richie’s sleep schedule crept slowly but surely away from comedian-bartender-vampire hours and toward a mishmash of early-rising insomnia. Eddie, on the other hand, wakes up at seven only because he’s supposed to, and only with an alarm. Their sleep patterns always collide erratically, like planets with elliptical orbits. It’s just that sometimes, when Eddie scrapes himself off Richie’s pullout couch after a late night, Richie is making eggs and singing loudly—he has a deceptively nice voice—and he holds out coffee and sometimes he says, “You’re just so cute when you sleep, Spaghetti, I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” His eyes are always bright and pleased, like they are when Eddie needs something off a high shelf.

Trying to pivot away from the little sore spot in his stomach that tells him he’s a piece-of-shit guilt-tripper, Eddie asks, _Do they let u have cats in starbucks?_

He makes himself overcooked eggs and washes Mike-and-Bill’s nonstick skillet very carefully. 

_am hanging out on bus,_ Richie says.

 _U don’t have to do that,_ Eddie replies with another little needle-prick of shame. _If u need some peace & quiet I can clear out of here _

Only a minute later, Richie replies: _nah man i’m already in the city, nothing to worry about,_ which is bad enough, and then a second message swoops in that says: _u should enjoy ur richie free afternoon. u work too much, ur blood pressure is probably total shit ;P_

It’s as direct and kind a dismissal as you could ask for, at least from somebody who maybe loves you and definitely doesn’t want to see you. Eddie does not bother explaining that, given the choice, he would spend his afternoon off watching Richie peck at his laptop keys with a furrow in between his brows as if he were writing _Crime and Punishment_ instead of dirty jokes. He considers saying _I’m sorry about last night,_ but that’s not even close to what he means. Eddie thinks, bitterly, that he has never once in his life had the right words for fucking anything, so why would he start now? When it matters?

Bill had snuck into Mike’s life—not because he was stealthy, but because he was true, the way you might not notice that the loveseat in your living room suddenly matched the couch. Of course, Eddie had experienced the progress of their relationship through Richie’s reports of Mike’s reports, but one day a cute visitor had wandered by mistake into the silent section of the law library, and the next Richie was dropping heavily into the seat next to Eddie and saying, “I think, you know, I think Bill’s going to be _around_ -around _.”_

So they had met Bill before he moved into Mike’s house, but only by a couple of months. Beforehand, Eddie mostly felt a kind of intellectual curiosity about the kind of person who would match up with Mike Hanlon, he of the acid-trip hiking and the 4H stories and the enormous, gently haunted book collection. Richie was just anxious. He made jokes, because he always made jokes, but Eddie knew he was on edge with the desire to come across okay, to be a good judge of character. To make the whole thing work out.

Blessedly, Bill was impossible not to like, handsome and puckish and self-effacing and steady. He said “thank you” four times when the server refilled his water glass. He had an intensely nerdy penchant for horror movies. He genuinely thought Richie was funny, even after Richie had opened with, “God, you’re like a lawn gnome. Do the bartenders even take your ID? Does Tinkerbell know you’re seeing other people?” and Bill had stuttered and Eddie had said “He’s fucking with you.” Most importantly, though, he turned into a little sunset when Mike touched his shoulder to lever himself out of the stupid bench seating at the restaurant. He watched Mike talk with this molten-orange look on his face, like, _holyshit holyshit holyshit._

Later, in Mike’s guest bathroom, Richie said, “Mike’s gonna marry that dude.”

Eddie started. “You think so?” he asked, when he was done choking on his multivitamin.

“I mean, Mike’s two great loves are Frodo Baggins and commitment,” Richie said drily. “And I know I just met Bill, but if anything, that dude might propose first.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. He watched the set of Richie’s face, his purposely casual eyebrows. “That’s a good thing, right? I mean, I like Bill.”

“What? Of course,” Richie said, eyes flicking up to meet Eddie in the mirror. “No, it’s really good. It’s just weird to think about, like, I watched that guy piss his pants and now he’s all, he’s... settling down.”

“I don’t really get it either,” Eddie offered.

Richie’s face scrunched, flashing the new furrow between his eyebrows that Eddie would come to love so much. He squeezed a glob of toothpaste onto his own toothbrush and then held the tube out toward Eddie, over the back of his left forearm like a waiter presenting a wine bottle. Eddie snorted at him but held his toothbrush out to accept anyway.

“You’re just mad ‘cause you’re gonna die alone and your Pomeranians are gonna eat your face,” Richie said, knocking him with an elbow.

“What, you gonna get married, Trashmouth?” Eddie asked. “You wanna hitch your wagon to somebody forever and go shopping for washing machines together and fight at the airport and shit?”

“I mean, someday, sort of, yeah, I do,” Richie said, and then he jammed his toothbrush into his mouth.

“Oh,” Eddie said.

Richie shrugged dramatically at him in the mirror, arms jerky, and Eddie realized he was embarrassed.

It made sense very quickly, actually, the little dominoes toppling with gusto. Richie liked to look after people, make them laugh and anticipate things they needed; he was protective and loyal and gave excellent gifts, even if they were never on the right days. He liked to be included and accepted physical comfort almost reverently. There was this improbable configuration of love inside of him, like how Jupiter is made of very determined hydrogen, and, sure, he could be kind of a prickly, blasé asshole, but only because once he started caring about you he had no way to stop. Their overgrown-fratboy schtick had made everything seem impermanent to Eddie, like the affection Richie threw around was part of the rest of his act. It only made sense that he would eventually find a real place to put it.

“Don’t look so shocked,” Richie had said after he spat into the sink. “I know I’m kind of a shithead, but Chevy Chase has been married for like thirty years, so.”

“I’m not shocked,” Eddie said around his toothbrush. That wasn’t entirely true, but he couldn’t think of a way to say “you would be a perfect husband, actually, I think you were basically made to belong to somebody” without sounding like a cult recruiter.

Before he could figure it out, Richie bumped him with an elbow again. “Spaghetti’s a skeptic, huh? Romance is for ditzes and dunces?”

Stupidly, Eddie’s eyes prickled. It was apples and oranges, if the apple was an heirloom variety the size of your head, and the orange was a hard little sour thing someone had picked too early. He felt love, in the same inconveniently overwhelming way that he felt everything else, but the verb form escaped him. He could only touch it with oven mitts on. It came out crabby or sarcastic or overbearing—never comprehensible, never what he meant. Like he was a barn cat leaving dead mice on the doorstep.

He chewed on his toothbrush long enough for his throat to go back to normal. “I don’t think it’s always stupid,” Eddie said, lightly as he could. “I just don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

The afternoon is interminable. Time gnaws on Eddie without making any marks. He gets a few minutes of relief from the tangled-up slinky of his nerves when he has a truly unpleasant email exchange with Richie’s lawyer, and then he actually solves the problem, and he’s back in hell. There is a Google Drive link in his inbox to the photos from the show in Milwaukee; the theater had been old and beautiful and Richie’s website needed some sprucing. Eddie indulges himself in the ritual torture of picking through them. He bookmarks a few to bully Richie into posting on Instagram. Then he opens one of Mike-and-Bill’s specialty beers, like some kind of animal, and hugs it to his chest morosely as he stares into Milwaukee-Richie’s eye crinkles.

Hi, he imagines saying. Hey, Rich, I love you, I mean, seriously. This has been going on for several years at least. I know I mostly boss you around and criticize your table manners, but I love you better and more than anybody else in the world. My friend Stan says that peahens are beige and stubby and peacocks fuck them anyway, so I am hoping we can figure something out. I’m sorry I made you say it first.

Eddie kicks his heels against the unrelenting pace of the universe, begging with everything in him just to know the outcome, good or bad, so he can start surviving it. The universe is unmoved, except for that the day, eventually, does wear on to night.

He sends Richie a screenshot of his Uber trip, which is both surge-priced and scheduled to drop him off well after Richie is meant to go onstage. _Sorry,_ Eddie says. _The driver is probably a nice guy but please don’t bring that up at my murder 2 trial._

 _no worries, it’s not like u haven’t seen this set enough to have it memorized,_ Richie replies. _also it would probably be voluntary manslaughter. c u after_

Eddie had cut the Uber a little close on purpose, actually. He’d texted Richie around three to say that he could be at the theater in time for sound check, and Richie had said _don’t worry abt it, i was already dicking around backstage so we got it out of the way early._ And Eddie had decided, in his infinite wisdom, that really it was for the best if he didn’t see Richie before his show, because it was rude to emotionally thrash a performer right before they go onstage, and god knows Eddie wouldn’t be able to so much as glimpse Richie’s sideburns without laying a giant gross love egg right in front of him.

Maybe he could bring it up in the car on the way home, if Richie didn’t fall asleep immediately. He did that sometimes.

The part of Eddie’s brain capable of risk-benefit analysis (risk: seeing Richie; benefit: also seeing Richie) throws a shitfit and gets out of the car the third or fourth time traffic grinds to a standstill. Eddie feels like a rabid Kia hamster. The car isn’t even making any funny noises he could apply his brain to and diagnose; Eddie’s knee bounces hard enough to wreck the suspension. “Lot of road work,” he says, for lack of anything else to do.

Martin (4.6 stars) nods. “The fourteen’s pretty much always like this,” he says wisely. “We got four seasons here. Almost winter, winter, still winter, and construction.”

Martin is wearing a wedding ring. Eddie, who grew up with a bus pass and a gorgon single mother, has never once wanted to strike up a conversation with anyone driving him anywhere, but he wants to ask Martin about it. How did you meet? What does it feel like? Do you understand each other when you aren’t making sense? How do you know if something is festering? Do you think that if one of you packed up their feelings about the other person in, let’s say, a bunch of excuses, like a styrofoam cooler, and then you left them there for so long that when you opened the lid they were barely recognizable—do you think that would be fixable? And would you forgive it?

Instead of doing any of that, Eddie looks away from the evening-sun glint off Martin’s fourth finger and fidgets with his phone. Richie’s handwriting, sprawled across the back of the case, pulls a microscopic smile out of him. Baby-Sitter’s Club, Kristy Speaking, “because she’s in charge and also for sure a lesbian, Eds, although I don’t expect you to know these things since I know you don’t have any sisters.” Richie has terrible fucking penmanship. His autograph, which people had started asking for maybe six years back, looks like a smashed spider, and not because he practiced it: that’s how he’s always written everything. It took Eddie a few years of trying, but he can always read Richie’s handwriting. He makes fun of it, but he still can.

 _You’re, like, my best friend,_ Richie had said.

Next to the highway, in between the monotonous hills and the off-ramps, there are little copses of poplar and white oak. They’re kind of pretty. Eddie rests his temple on the car window and hopes.

“I hear people like jokes about sex,” Richie says, wandering stage left. “No, fuck whoever cheered, do I _look_ like I’m getting laid?”

Seeing him hits Eddie’s wound-up, unforgiving body like a vodka shot. It cuts right through his day-long buildup of angst, this desire to rip off Richie’s stupid sweater and maul him.

It’s not a stupid sweater. Eddie picked it out, in burgundy, because stage clothes are Eddie’s only opportunity to coerce Richie into wearing colors that suit him. Eddie had said (correctly) that a cardigan was cohesive with his whole hyperverbal Ivy-dropout South Park thing; Richie said it made him look like a side character on _Portlandia,_ but he’s still wearing it. And Christ, he’s handsome in every iteration, but Eddie’s always had a weakness for the way Richie looks onstage. Lit up warm and clear, with the planes of his cheeks showing in interesting, mannish ways. He is the only thing Eddie wants to look at ever again, but also, he’s cradling an animal.

Eddie retreats reluctantly through the wings and back to the stage manager. “Hey,” he says. He can’t remember her name. “Hey, uh, hi, excuse me, why the fuck is the cat onstage?”

He tries to say it sort of gently. She looks both unfazed by and unimpressed with his tone and word choice. “Like, his motivation? No clue. He was carrying her around during soundcheck and she didn’t seem to mind. That’s gotta be the chillest cat in the world.”

“She’s not chill, she’s just mostly deaf and obsessed with him,” Eddie snaps. He takes a long breath in through his nose and then out. “Can you at least tell me where the cat carrier is?”

“Stage right, I think the third or fourth wing,” the stage manager says. “We did make him sign a piece of paper that said he wouldn’t sue the theater if she bolted.”

Eddie doesn’t even know what to Google to figure out what kind of liability this is. He starts to walk away, then pivots back. The stage manager raises her eyebrows. One of them is accented with a little steel barbell.

“I just have to let him have this one, right?” Eddie asks. “Like, there’s no way to stop it.”

She finally cracks a smile. “Probably not.”

“Can’t leave him alone for five seconds,” Eddie mutters, and he’s not lying, but he is omitting the fact that he just doesn’t want to.

It is, admittedly, very cute, Puddy tucked into the generous crook of Richie’s left elbow. Her tail is wrapped around her little butt, and one black-and-white paw curves out over Richie’s forearm. Her head is almost invisible in the folds of sweater.

“I’m an open-minded guy,” Richie says as Eddie settles back into his spot in the curtains. “I try to understand straight people. I respect their culture.”

He’s trying to drag the microphone cord around behind him without disturbing the cat. It’s extremely charming. It adds a layer to the experience: as much as Eddie enjoys this show, Richie was right when he said Eddie knew it cold. He knows the timing when Richie says, “In fact, my favorite branch of the horror genre is the romantic comedy”; he knows the pause for laughter. This time, Richie takes the opportunity to scratch Puddy’s head with his microphone hand.

Eddie could do the closed captions without even listening:

>> _No, hear me out -- people say that horror movies only make sense if none of the characters have ever seen a horror movie before in their life_ [laughter] _and I think that’s fair_

>> _They’re missing all these basic survival skills -- like, I don’t know about you, but if I arrive somewhere during a thunderstorm, I just won’t fucking go inside_

>> [overlapping laughter] _Fuck the Holiday Inn Express -- I’ll sleep in my car_

>> _And romantic comedies are exactly the same -- people will really throw a coin in a fountain and then have the gall to act shocked when they get married -- you know_ [high British accent] _oh, damn, it’s Christmastime, I sure hope I don’t get introduced to anyone symmetrical -- and we all know that the worst part of a romantic comedy is when people fall in love_ [pause for laughter] _because it takes them, like, another forty-five minutes and a musical number to catch on_

>> _Watching someone in a rom-com try to do introspection is exhausting -- it really chafes my taint to see two hot people make loaded eye contact and go_ [high, feminine] _‘oh my god, what’s this feeling… what the hell is happening to me…’ -- like, you’re at a candlelit French restaurant, you fucking idiot_ [rising laughter] _what do you think is going on?_

>> _I have no sympathy for that shit -- oh, is this aloof journalist pissing you off? -- Did your childhood best friend grow up handsome? -- Is it fucking raining, you total waste of neurons -- Is it raining at a moment of emotional climax?_

>> [gruff and strident, as if a football coach] _Circle up, motherfuckers. Where am I losing you? Rachel, I need you to get your head in the game. If Mark Ruffalo is there and your downstairs is tingly_ [laughter] _you better just assume you’re in love and start fucking running!_

>> _I mean sometimes I can’t even enjoy the movie anymore -- I have to, like, set down my popcorn and take my hand out of my pants and -- what? What, did I not JUST specify that I’m watching a Mark Ruffalo movie?_ [pause for laughter] _No, I’m totally kidding. I’m not that depraved._

>> [pauseforlaughter]

>> _No, it has to be Nicholas Cage._

The audience tonight is bubbling over, delighted, and Richie leads them around by that laugh like a puppy on a leash. If Eddie didn’t know the show like the back of his hand, he wouldn’t have any idea that Richie is going off-script, but he does, and, suddenly, Richie is.

“I don’t mean to sound harsh, you know, I’m just concerned,” Richie says, fake-leaving on the mic stand. He scuffs his foot on the floor: worried, paternal. “I know they can do better. I mean, I’m not exactly the Galapagos finch of emotional evolution, but they make me feel so well-adjusted. I get kind of, uh, uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways about it. Like, oh, did you figure out that you’re in love at prom? When I was your age, I could do that in a port-a-potty at Warped Tour.”

Someone hoots from the left side of the theater, halfway up, and Richie nods at them. “Yeah, real learning annex, that place. But anybody can get on my level. It’s about self-awareness. Remember the 3 Bs: butterflies, blushing, boners.”

When he’s onstage, Richie uses all of Eddie’s favorite mannerisms. He’s fidgety, even with his deadpan delivery. When he’s in the middle of something kind of long-winded, he starts walking his feet out to the sides, sinking into this dorky V stance that makes Eddie retroactively fond of the hyperactive twelve-year-old Richie certainly was, once upon a time.

“One time,” Richie says, with the air of a bored homeroom teacher, “I realized I was in love with a guy while he was replacing his shoelaces. Never seen a grown man replace shoelaces before. He lost an aglet, couldn’t cope. So cute.”

Eddie burns from feet to forehead. He had not realized there were parts of his body that hadn’t heard yet that Richie might love him. He watches Puddy’s tail twitching as his eyes get hot.

Richie nods like this information is table salt and not Tabasco sauce. “Um, I was the officiant at my friend’s gay wedding and my date asked if it was exempt from the Bechdel test. That did it for me. One time it was because I caught a guy on Amazon dot com pricing CPR dummies, like, _very_ skeptically. One time it was while a guy was telling me he had just visited his mother’s grave—” he pauses to give Puddy’s forehead another scratch— “to make sure nobody put any flowers on it, because she was a _huge_ bitch. One time it happened—see, I really put it all out there, I went ‘we make a good team, don’t we?’ and he thought about it and then he said, ‘like, a soccer team, where all the players have to be good, or a basketball team, where one person can carry everybody else?’ God, I _know._ Stop fucking clapping, I liked him first.”

Eddie can’t look at him and can’t breathe. It’s something like realizing you put your feet on someone’s couch by accident, as if Eddie has spent nearly a decade slouching all over Richie’s life, except that Richie framed the creases and smudges like little souvenirs in a shadowbox. Even Richie’s stupid Eddie Voice feels like a pet name, which is to say that it feels the way it always feels.

He feels vain-grateful-selfish-relieved when Richie segues away, sliding back towards stage left with the mic cord slithering behind him.

“I’m still single, but every rom-com protagonist who spends two hours tripping over their own dick figures their shit out? No, I know what you’re saying,” he says, as if greatly put upon. “Richie, they end up together _because_ of the misadventures, not in spite of them. _Exactly._ That’s what’s so fucking scary. In a traditional horror movie, right, the idiots die. You do stupid shit, and then some zombie twink with knife gloves separates your soul from your body, just like God intended. Okay, but tell me what happens at the end of a romantic comedy.”

He holds the microphone out to the audience, just long enough for them to start making hesitant noises, before he takes it back and says, “That’s right, heterosexual sex.” They laugh, and Richie gives them a scandalized look. “It’s not funny! The two people who do the _stupidest_ shit get crowned king and queen of dumbass mountain, and they ride off into the sunset together _,_ like some kind of sick reverse Darwin award. No offense to my friend and lifecoach Alfred Hitchcock, but nothing keeps me up at night like the fact that I can’t sit down with those bitches from _The Wedding Singer_ and just say, like, before you start reproducing, let’s try to go one, maybe two days without self-sabotaging. Sometimes the call _is_ coming from inside the house, _Drew Barrymore.”_

The laugh stretches and reverbs. Richie situates the microphone back on the stand to try and remove the cap from his water bottle one-handed. He grins, self-deprecating. “Go ahead and take your time with that one, it has layers.”

The jostling is finally enough to provoke a loud, irritated meow out of Puddy. “Oh, shit,” Richie says, half-bent-over and barely in range of the microphone. “Somebody doesn’t like it when I talk shit about Nora Ephron.”

Too startled to stop himself, Eddie finally laughs. The line of Richie’s neck stiffens, and Eddie knows he heard, but he doesn’t look over. 

He looks at Eddie exactly once during the show. Puddy wakes up long enough to see the mic cord waving around, and she jumps gracefully down from his arms to investigate, and Richie just sort of stares at her. As long as Eddie’s known him, Richie’s been funny in a staticky, instinctive way, but he’s gotten more and more comfortable with an audience, looping them in like they’re on his side. He follows the cat with his eyes for a beat, and then he says, “I honestly didn’t think this far ahead.”

The crowd laughs and loves him. Eddie, with visions of _Homeward Bound_ dancing in his head, pats down the pockets of his jacket and then the cat carrier. He scores a bag of Greenies. Puddy doesn’t seem to have any ambitions of leaving the stage, but Eddie’s still relieved when she starts prowling toward him.

“You leavin’ me, baby?” Richie says. “And you said you weren’t gonna be like all the other girls. Yeah, go on. Go talk to—” his eyes flick up to the shaking bag of treats, Eddie crouched next to the light tree. “Eddie to the rescue,” Richie says, holding the microphone in both hands, eyebrows soft and sorry.

 _I don’t mind,_ Eddie tries to project. _Any of it, even a little bit, even for a second._

Then Puddy’s close enough to grab, her little body hot from the lights. The audience laughs when Eddie’s disembodied, gray-suited arms emerge from the curtains, and Richie turns back to them and says, “Round of applause for Eddie the manager, everybody. A real class act. Sorry I didn’t tell you I was bringing the cat onstage, man.”

Eddie pulls Puddy up to his chest as they clap and holds her like a boon, a bumpy little good luck charm, as he waits for the thing stuck in his throat to dissolve.

“I’m Richie Tozier, you’ve all been a huge pain in the ass, good night!”

The audience roars. He exits to one of the back wings, and Eddie sticks his nose directly into the top of Puddy’s head before he drops her back in the carrier. “Big day, old lady,” he says, zipping it up. She seems unaffected. His hands are shaking just slightly.

He turns toward backstage, and Richie doesn’t appear for a minute, which is okay: Eddie does, despite all appearances, have a little patience. He has patience the way Puddy has body fat. His phone vibrates in his pocket—a G-Cal reminder for the meet-and-greet after the show. Sure, mile 25. A little further.

But then Richie does round the corner, his soft sweater and the nervous set of his arms and his hair a little fucked up in the front where he wiped the performance sweat from his forehead. He looks at Eddie in his silent, serious way, with broken-open eyes, two halves of a bowl still holding water. Eddie loves him like a forest loves a hillside.

“So how was your day?” Richie asks.

And Eddie very much throws himself forward.

He feels less like a romantic lead and more like a zebra mussel or an action figure, but his body wants, he wants, in a very specific way—he throws his arms around Richie’s neck and slots their mouths together. It’s too hard; somebody someday should kiss Richie with more give and less heat. Still, Richie’s chest is warm and solid and so are his hands where they land on Eddie’s hips as if he needed to keep the two of them from falling over. It’s not nothing.

Eddie thinks, desperately: please, _please._ He lifts one finger just a few inches to trace the shell of Richie’s ear. _Holy fuck,_ Richie whispers right onto his mouth, and then the floor is gone.

Okay, so he loses the floor. Fuck the floor. Richie’s arms are all the way around the his waist, tight, pulling him up, and his head turns so Eddie can kiss him thoroughly without making any extra space between their bodies—the dirtiest Eddie’s ever kissed anybody in his life, maybe, all the intensity finally right, deep and probably stupid-looking with their faces turned steeply so Richie’s perfect dumb chin is out of the way and Eddie can lick the back of his teeth. The stubble on Richie’s cheek scratches Eddie’s nose, that’s how hard Eddie’s trying to crawl inside of his body. Richie hitches him up just a little. Like a grocery bag. Eddie wants to laugh, but then the muscles on the back of Richie’s neck move when he tilts Eddie’s head up higher, nose to nose, and kisses him again, and Eddie’s stomach twists and swoops like a clothesline in the wind. It feels ways he never conceived of, even after all that time he had to imagine.

He runs out of air pretty quickly after that.

Richie sets him down—gentle as you please, but not very far away at all. He has a shocked glimmering look on his face, and Eddie feels the weight all over his heaving shoulders—of having kissed him once, of knowing Richie would let him do it again. Richie’s eyes are steady.

“You had new material,” Eddie says, brain spinning unevenly like a hard-boiled egg on a kitchen table.

Richie’s eyes dip down to Eddie’s mouth twice. “Yeah, I had new material,” he says, voice small and downy.

“I, uh,” Eddie says. “It was okay.”

“I can work on it,” Richie says, still quiet, but wry in a way Eddie wants to shake out of his ear like a water droplet.

“No, it’s not—”

He has to look away from Richie’s eyes; it is either that or he can’t say it, and he needs to say it. He looks down at the neck of Richie’s t-shirt and reaches out to adjust it, wishing it was a collared shirt he could cling to with both hands. He says, to the beloved protrusions of Richie’s collarbone, “I think sometimes, people are very aware they’re, they’re in love with somebody, and they just haven’t—said it yet.”

“You love me?” Richie asks, as if his voice could get any softer.

Eddie looks up at him, at the little shining edges of his glasses and mouth and eyes. He nods. Once, certain. If it’s the best he can do then so be it. “Did you really have no idea?” Eddie asks.

A smile pesters the right corner of Richie’s mouth. “I just really hoped you did.”

“Sorry,” Eddie says, despite himself.

Richie’s whole face wavers like a stepped-in puddle. “What are you sorry for?”

Eddie blinks at him. “I know I don’t always, um.” His eyes slide to the curtain behind Richie’s head. “Show it. Right.”

Richie’s eyebrows tack in, and he cups Eddie’s elbow with his right hand, but then the stage manager appears out of the darkness. Eddie feels a confused gratitude towards her. “I’m seriously so sorry to interrupt,” she says, in a way that lights up the very slim space between Richie and Eddie like the Miracle Mile, “but the line and the posters and everything are ready. Whenever.”

“Posters,” Richie says.

“For the meet and greet,” the stage manager says.

Eddie extricates himself from between Richie’s feet. “We’re, um,” he says. “Remind me where that’s going to be?”

The stage manager jerks a thumb behind her. “I’ll show you,” she says, and then, mercifully, “I’ll just be in the hallway.”

“This is so fucked up,” Richie says when she disappears. “I can’t do a meet and greet. You just turned my brain into oatmeal.”

“Yes you can,” Eddie replies. He pushes Richie’s glasses up, makes a lame attempt to subjugate his hair.

“They’re gonna know I’m goop,” Richie says, with a hint of real fear.

“They’re gonna love you,” Eddie says.

“You can’t know that.”

“I know everything.”

Richie huffs. “Okay, I trust you.”

He kisses Eddie again, gallantly, one hand under Eddie’s ribs and one on his jaw. Eddie grips the hair at the nape of Richie’s neck and lets himself be swooned.

Waiting through the meet-and-greet is not as terrible as Eddie imagined. It’s a decent-size show, a medium group of people. Richie stands in front of a backdrop as one person from box office checks passes and another waves people up, takes photos, sends them away. Eddie sits off to the side in a bean bag chair, of all things, with Puddy’s carrier tucked next to the wall. Someone had offered him another seat, but he waved them off, sort of enjoying the leisure of curling up to watch Richie charm people.

And he does: he’s good at this, warm and talkative, glowing under the approval. He signs notebooks and posters and flags and one face. Every once in a while, though, he glances over to Eddie. He looks flushed and happy and intent, like he’s trying to puzzle something out.

They used to do these by themselves, shoved in any old corner to let anyone who felt like it come up and talk. Eddie feels nostalgic for it, a little. He used to enjoy calling a cutoff when someone was too weird or too drunk or too friendly, saying “okay, it’s time to fuck off” and shepherding Richie away by the waist. Eddie wasn’t above a power trip then, and he isn’t now: he watches the procession of admirers and lazily thinks _he’s going home with me,_ just to feel the hot little curl of pleasure in his gut.

Finally, though, the door closes behind the last fan. Eddie waits as Richie thanks his helpers briefly, shoves a few gifts into his stretchy cardigan pockets, and then walks over on his long legs. Eddie looks up at him without moving. It’s a good angle.

“Hey,” Richie says. “Can I tell you something if you promise not to make fun of me?”

Eddie’s stomach turns into an entire cypress swamp ecosystem, fireflies darting and frogs splashing into and out of the water. “Yeah, of course.”

Richie kicks out one of his sneakers, tapping the sole of Eddie’s shoe. “So.” He takes a breath through his nose. “I didn’t know that you—I didn’t know how you felt about me—“

“I love you,” Eddie interrupts.

Richie smiles at him, a little acquiescing tilt of his head like they’re on opposing debate teams. “That you love me. But, uh, I always felt very loved. Around you.”

Eddie swallows effortfully, feeling still horny but now also more than a little emotional, sweetly bruised like a stone fruit.

“I mean, I know I don’t exactly scream handle with care, but you always did that,” Richie says.

Eddie smiles at him, close-lipped. He feels like a little kid. It goes all the way out to the edges of his cheeks, shaky like a Shel Silverstein drawing.

“I said not to make fun of me!” Richie protests.

“I’m not!” Eddie says, and he holds his hands out in silent demand.

When Richie pulls him up, Eddie frames his lovely square face with his hands and kisses him very deliberately, soft and solid, hunching his shoulders up as if to press it in deeper. He pulls back, but he does not let go of Richie’s face, which adores down at him quite strongly.

“Do you want me to tie you up with the shoelaces?” Eddie asks. “Now I’m making fun of you.”

“Well, I know you picked them for their tensile strength,” Richie says.

They collect their things; Richie kneels down in front of the carrier to tell Puddy that the reviews are excellent, people are calling her a Rita Rudner for the new generation, and he’s going to buy her her own apartment. Eddie is patting down his pockets to make sure he’s not leaving anything behind when Richie hooks him by the collar and drags him toward the hallway. “It’s nice out!” he says. “Let’s go make out in an alley while we wait for the Uber.”

“Jesus,” Eddie says, faux-crabby, straightening out his jacket sleeves. “You’re like a fuckin’ planet.”

Richie laughs his summery laugh, happy and sharp. “I knew this was a size thing for you, Spaghetti.”

Eddie feels himself blush, because that’s not _not_ true, but he smacks Richie between the shoulder blades anyway. “I mean, like, ever since we fuckin’ met, I can’t stop running in circles around you. You know, gravitational force.”

Richie throws his free arm around Eddie’s shoulders and kisses the top of his head again, sending little shivers over his scalp. “Eddie, baby,” he says, pushing the stage door open to the cool autumn night, “that was me pulling.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks 2 all my friends but especially charlie for being patient and indulgent!!!!!

**Author's Note:**

> there were two fics i kept thinking about as i was writing this. one is Intuitive Management by ezlebe, where eddie is richie's manager, which stamped a permanent stamp into my brain. the other is Muscles Better and Nerves More by jerry_duty, which has really spectacularly beautiful language, and i found myself trying to copy that writer a lot, so.


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